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Katherine you must come to my table. I’ve got Oscar Wilde there. He’s the most marvelous man I ever met. He’s splendid! Over at the Paris Review Daily, Dan Piepenbring posted an excerpt from Katherine Mansfield’s 1920 letter to her husband describing a dream in which she met the playwright Oscar Wilde.
...moreIf you could only bring one book to a remote island infested by penguins, what would it be? The Paris Review’s Dan Piepenbring has a write-up of Nobel Laureate Anatole France’s novel Penguin Island, which is pretty much what it sounds like.
...moreMost writers have imagined the scene of their own death—in the hopes of stylizing the moment or savoring the thought of someone sifting through and publishing their old manuscripts. It seems that James Tate, even in death, outdid us all by leaving his earthly post in the most writerly way possible: with a delightful last […]
...moreAt the Paris Review, Dan Piepenbring revisits a century-old Japanese short story called “The Nose” (not to be confused with the Gogol story). Connecting it to contemporary narcissism and self-documentation on social media, Piepenbring makes the case that Akutagawa Ryūnosuke’s creepy tale is more relevant than ever: There’s a book to be written about the evolution of […]
...moreThe Old Soak is a hauntingly one-note character, and one wonders exactly what about his alcoholism made him such a bankable franchise. Imagine the pitch meetings that followed: “He’s a lush, see? He wants to booze it up, but he can’t, because of that cursed eighteenth amendment!” Yuks ensue, contracts are signed, and everyone has […]
...moreDesert managed, impressively, to publish lively, intelligent writing about a very dry place, month after month. Dan Piepenbring browsed through archive.org’s huge magazine collection to discover Desert, a publication from the Southwest entirely devoted to… deserts! You can read more and take a look at some of the magazine’s covers over at the Paris Review.
...moreOver at the Paris Review, Dan Piepenbring talks about James Wright’s famous epiphanic poem Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota, in conjunction with Ann Beattie’s new story Yancey, and the general discussion and controversy of the poem’s famous last line: “I have wasted my life.”
...moreWith the help of math and computers, a University of Nebraska English professor has been plotting the basic shapes of novels (spoiler: there are six), but this time in a new way. Instead of focusing on plot as action, Matthew Jockers is tracking the positive or negative charge of words to reveal plot as emotional […]
...moreAfter a Times article last March criticized Spain (and its literary establishment) for failing to unravel the mystery of the precise location of Miguel de Cervantes’s grave, a reinvigorated search may have finally yielded results. Cervantes was buried in Madrid’s Trinitarias convent, but the specific site was not marked (or not marked well); the discovery […]
...moreIn the wake of D’Angelo’s Black Messiah, Dan Piepenbring waxes poetic on R&B groups, the state of the genre, and how, when it comes down to it, the swinging feel of a swinging chorus is all but irreplaceable: Not that you have to be a music scholar to enjoy the sound of people singing together. […]
...moreSmart was known, with his “disturbed mental state,” for his loud, feverish, constant praying, and you can read some of that catatonia in Jubilate, with its litany of “for”s and its incantatory quality. Over at the Paris Review, Dan Piepenbring introduces us to Christopher Smart, an interesting, unknown poet from the XVIII century who is […]
...moreIn September, we mentioned Dan Piepenbring’s essay on the artfulness of the Paris Review’s junk mail. Head to 3:AM Magazine for some more randomly-generated poetry, Michael Naghten Shanks’s Selected Spam Haikus, like this one: pull wealth out of your deep brown beans when they invite a oscillation.
...moreRay Bradbury would’ve turned ninety-four this weekend. Dan Piepenbring commemorates his influence at The Paris Review: “Do you know why teachers use me? Because I speak in tongues. I write metaphors. Every one of my stories is a metaphor you can remember. The great religions are all metaphor. We appreciate things like Daniel and the lion’s […]
...moreTurns out that both Jorge Luis Borges and Jean-Paul Sartre reviewed Orson Welles’s masterpiece Citizen Kane, and neither of them particularly cared for the film. Needless to say, the director didn’t take this very well. Head over to the Paris Review to read both of the writers’ critiques of the movie, and Welles’s response.
...moreIn celebration of Guy de Maupassant’s 164th birthday, Paris Review blogger Dan Piepenbring revisits his, ahem, seminal story, “Boule de Suif,” about a French prostitute who, like Melville’s Bartleby, would “prefer not to.” Read his coverage here, and the original piece here.
...moreThe Baffler has a newly designed website, which includes all of its 25 issues, available for free. With so much talk about the New Yorker opening its digital gates this summer, let’s not forget “the Journal that Blunts the Cutting Edge.” If you need some ideas of where to start, Dan Piepenbring has recommendations at […]
...moreDan Piepenbring writes at the Paris Review about the universe inside industrial-supply catalogs, which offer a different kind of poetry to readers: And so I often reach for it in pursuit of a kind of materialist awe. It makes for a reading experience more engaging, imaginative, and informative than almost anything that passes as literature. I’ve put down […]
...moreBefore life on the iPad keypad there was life on the QWERTY computer keypad, and before that, the architecture of the typewriter. Dan Piepenbring reports on the history of the typewriter which was, ah yes, “rife with collaboration, ingenuity, betrayal, setbacks, lucre, acrimony, misguided experimentation, and bickering white men.”
...moreI came from, not a small town, but basically not a very interesting place…So it was very important for me not to rebel but simply to get away, to go away. Travel writing doesn’t have to be lackluster. It can be smart and a pleasure to read, a form of literature in its own right, […]
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